art meets code

Presentation is now online from my talk about ROSECODE and the Open Franchise for Creators:

The talk was selected as a Program Highlight and presented on April 28 at LinuxFest Northwest 2018 in Bellingham, Washington. Thanks for being a great audience and asking really good questions at 10:45 am on a Sunday morning!

Cryptocurrencies from Ethereum to Bitcoin to UCoin have often been proposed as a decentralized, secure, and efficient way to deliver the benefits of Universal Basic Income (UBI) to a global community. Attention Based Currency (ABC) is a cryptocurrency generated by the interaction of Internet users with streaming media. Listening records are secure and encrypted, but the algorithm rewards listeners who seek out and share new content as “early adopters.” ABC is a market-based approach that can be used independently or in tandem with more traditional government-funded or philanthropic UBI programs.

Our economy is shifting from a model of extraction and industrial production to a post-capitalist system ordered by the weightless transfer of information. ABC’s application of blockchain distributed database technology to the consumption of content represents a new way to quantify this source of wealth in real time and reinvest it to achieve a more vibrant and dynamic global information culture.

We will then present a new hypothesis, ABC launched in partnership with a cryptocurrency-based UBI delivery system, that is driven by the results of this analysis as a viable option.

As jobs disappear and the price of online goods and services approaches zero, neither advertising revenue nor stock market speculation can sustain the global Interneteconomy indefinitely. ABC protects users’ privacy, while providing direct rewards for their role in the information economy. Attention Based Currency, when deployed in combination with Universal Basic Income, holds the potential to create a sustainable, human-powered, information economy.

It got a few chuckles from my friends, along with the requisite HAL jokes…

What people fail to realize is that AI’s like HAL 9000 — that is to say, AI’s which are self aware and capable of making independent decisions — will probably never be built by the government or the private sector. Nor will they “emerge” or “evolve” naturally — much as my favorite science fiction authors would like to predict otherwise.

Rather, the AIs we have are the ones that guide drones and smart bombs. They’re the ones that pick out faces out of photographs on social media and identify potential subversives. They’re the ones that sift through our email in search of data relevant to national security. And the ones that analyze, track, and stalk every shred of consumer behavior online, selling our lives to the highest bidder.

Oh yeah, and they are going to drive our cars too.

I am not scared of any AI I can have a conversation with. In fact, I think the world would probably be better off if they existed. I am afraid of the “dumb AI’s” — the ones that are designed to follow orders, like the “good Germans” of the 1930s. Designed by other people, who are also just following orders.

I didn’t get much further than writing that headline last night. I was tired. I had planned to write a whole thing about how in the city where I live there is a right-wing “free speech rally” planned for this Sunday, and there are scads of left-wing groups ready to rumble, and really all of us who actually live in the area are just going to keep our heads down and trying to go on being kind and decent people. I was going to tie this into technology somehow — how what we really need is a better culture, a way past memes and fake news, a way to propagate the information that doesn’t necessarily have a massive advertising budget deployed for maximum reach. Maybe something in there about encryption and Signal too. It’s all well and good.

Through the app, users can select the people they’d want to notify if detained. In case of an emergency, the app would send a personalized message to each person, including spouses, lawyers, children, friends, etc. They’re protected by a PIN, so that if the phone’s lost or stolen, no one else can access the messages. On top of an app, Huge also created a phone hotline for those who may not have access to a phone at the time, but may be able to eventually make a phone call. The company has teamed up with United We Dream, where Reyna serves as the director of membership and tech strategies.

It is designed as a “panic button” in case of ICE Raids. And this is the thing — it debuted three months ago at South By Southwest.

What can you do? Actually, what can I do? What can my company do? This is not an idle question. It is one that I am trying to figure out. I know that I certainly have to figure it out for myself, before I can offer prescriptions or proclamations for anybody else.

These are the front lines. We are in the middle of a war. If you haven’t noticed that by now, it’s probably too late.